On Wednesday, the – take a breath – Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Bridge Naming Committee will release its list of six finalists for the name of the new crossing. So there’s no better time to review the more popular suggestions – and hope that the committee has rejected most of them.

Many of them are cringe-worthy (“Bridgevana,” “Katzwalk”), remarkably uninspired (“Portland Bridge,” “Willamette Crossing”) or predictably vindictive (“Boondoggle Bridge,” “Clackistan Bridge”). No one actually wants tourists to ask them where the “Bridgevana” is, do they?

Given the names of most current Portland bridges – not to mention streets, schools and neighborhoods – many have suggested someone non-white and/or non-male, and that seems fair enough. This isn’t political-correctness-gone-wrong (that happened when we decided “junior high school” was degrading). This is just a matter of simple fairness, and it’s long-overdue.

Naming the bridge after beloved street performer Kirk Reeves is a good idea. But Working Kirk was such a personable and light-hearted human being that it seems a bit grandiose. Instead of a stoic, monumental structure, how about an approachable, life-sized statue of the man, located right where he used to stand on the Hawthorne Bridge? Give him a tuxedo, a trumpet and Mickey Mouse ears, and let Kirk keep doing what he loved doing: making commuters smile for all eternity.

Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick went looking for a female figure and, embarrassingly, landed on “Lisa Simpson Bridge.” The Simpsons character, Novick said, is “the most prominent environmentalist with Portland roots.” We should all hope that isn’t true. Lisa is an environmentalist caricature, a well-intentioned yet painfully self-righteous, self-serious do-gooder. In other words, she’s the cartoonish embodiment of exactly the kind of Portland stereotype that we all have enough trouble dispelling as it is.

Besides, as one online commenter said, “something tells me there are real women to choose from.”

And there are, of course. There’s pioneer Elizabeth Caruthers, for example. But she was really only notable as an early female landowner – and she already has two streets and a park with her name on them. A few female politicians are possibilities, but Edith Green has a federal building downtown, and Vera Katz has an “esplanade” on the east side.

And then there’s suffrage-campaigner Abigail Scott Duniway, who is possibly the front-runner at the moment, at least judging by internet enthusiasm. She is certainly a worthy candidate, but she already has a school and a park named in her honor. Surely there’s someone equally notable who isn’t so celebrated, right?

Well, yes. Many, to be sure.

But the most prominent Portlander without any sort of memorial is likely a woman named Beatrice Morrow Cannady.

You’ve probably never heard of her – I certainly hadn’t – but Cannady was arguably Oregon’s most important civil rights advocate of the 20th century. She edited Oregon’s largest (and at times only) African-American newspaper, co-founded Portland’s chapter of the NAACP and was the first black woman to practice law in the state.

She was the first African-American to run for elected office in Oregon, and she helped write the state’s first civil rights legislation (which failed). In 1928 – 27 years before Rosa Parks’ famous protest – Cannady refused to give up her seat in the orchestra section of a Portland theater (and won).

She argued vehemently against racism in the pages of her newspaper, while at the same time giving hundreds of lectures for white audiences and hosting interracial teas and musical events for the explicit purpose of improving race relations. And she did this at a time when Portland was a KKK hotbed, when Oregon still had anti-black migration laws on the books and when most downtown restaurants hung “whites-only” signs in their windows.

If, as many have suggested, our new bridge ought to be named after a metaphorical “bridge-builder,” then surely there is no more worthy candidate than Cannady. Her name may not have been a popular suggestion so far, but I hope the committee will think it should have been.